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From the 1860s to the 1880s, Clowes’s career blossomed. Working from her backyard studio at Heartsease and her orange grove in Florida, she captured the bucolic spirit of rural America. Driven and dedicated to her craft, she wrote to her sister that she would not marry–she was “wedded to her easel.”
By 1865, Clowes began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design in New York City. A few years later, she offered work for sale at Archibald Wilson’s store on Main Street in Poughkeepsie, which helped bring her paintings to the attention of the local elite. Over the next twenty years, Clowes painted dozens of scenes depicting local prize cattle, horses, and sheep, as well as other wholesome scenes of farm life.
With her spirited and sweet scenes, Clowes emerged onto the art world’s international stage in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Her painting Cattle at the Brook, now lost, was displayed in Memorial Hall alongside the works of Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, and Sanford Gifford—all hung salon style to represent the nation’s finest art.
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